Welcome to Modern Art & Ideas! This course is designed for anyone interested in learning more about modern and contemporary art. Over the next five weeks, you will look at art through a variety of themes: Places & Spaces, Art & Identity, Transforming Everyday Objects, and Art & Society. Each week kicks off with a video that connects works of art from The Museum of Modern Art’s collection to the theme. You will hear audio interviews with artists, designers, and curators and learn more about selected works in the additional readings and resources.
Throughout this course you will discover how artists:
-- represent place and take inspiration from their environment,
-- create works of art to express, explore, and question identity,
-- use everyday objects to challenge assumptions about what constitutes a work of art and how it should be made,
-- and respond to the social, cultural, and political issues of their time through works of art.
Through the discussion forum prompts and peer review assignment, you will also have the opportunity to connect with other learners and explore how these themes resonate with your own life and experience.

DP

What a genuinely refreshing course that really caught me attention. Well done to the team behind this course as I am more interested in modern art after completing this course than ever before.

PY

Nov 01, 2018

Filled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled Star

The whole program was very well organized, and I liked how the themes were not in chronological order. All the narration and artists’ talk were interesting and highly informative. Thanks!

From the lesson

Module 5: Art & Society

Explore works of art created in response to the social, cultural, and political issues of their time. Gain a deeper understanding of history and contemporary society. Be encouraged to think critically about world events and how they are depicted.

Taught By

Lisa Mazzola

Assistant Director, School and Teacher Programs

Transcript

Hello. My name is Faith Ringgold and we're looking at my work, American People Series, Number 20, Die, painted in 1967. In the early 1960s, while still exploring different techniques of painting, I had learned in art school, I became fascinated with the ability of art to document the time, place, and cultural identity of the artist. How could I as an African-American woman artist document what was happening all around me? I would try to tell my story with images of America as I saw it in the 1960s. There was a lot of spontaneous rioting, and fighting in the street, and undocumented killings of African-American people and great racism. It was amazing what was happening. Everybody talked about it but I would never see anything about it on television. Nothing. And so, I decided that I would make this painting and would make a spontaneous street riot inspired by Guernica. Picasso is one of my favorite artists. When Guernica used to be at the Museum of Modern Art, I'd bring my two daughters and we would go to the Picasso room, and we would look at Guernica, and I decided that I would use it as my inspiration for this piece. I started off by dividing the background into 18 squares and those squares really represent the sidewalk which basically was always the background of a riot because anybody is going to fall on the ground. There's something there that bespeaks of spontaneous violence. So you can see they're all dressed in business suits and they're all howdy doody but they're fighting for their position in life, in America, to be retained. I tried to put myself in that position because there's a little story here with each one of these people. Then there's people who have already attacked somebody and they're trying to beat them down. And then there's people looking for somebody. Running after each other and screaming and carrying on against that background. Having women with children there was very important. Because women are going to protect their children no matter what. These children they are in the center, they gravitate toward each other. They don't know each other, but they're going to try to help each other. They are the innocent victims here. I am going to put blood in this because that's what happens when people fight. They're fighting to kill in reality and blood personifies death. I want you to be upset. You're not supposed to see people rioting and killing each other or even know that they're hating each other without being upset. I wanted to show a kind of abstraction of what the fights were really all about. And they had a lot to do with race, and class and no one was left out. It was to make sure that certain people on the bottom don't get to the top. This was going on then, it's happening again now. And every time I see one of those big riots in the street here today, I think back to Die.

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